Sacred Touch

Isaiah 35:4-7, Mark 7:24-37

September 6, 2009

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

When faced with situations in which people were in need of healing, what would Jesus do? He would heal them. And he would break the rules to do it.

He healed at times, like the Sabbath, when people thought it was inappropriate to heal. He healed people that others thought he should not spend his resources on, like foreigners and children, the poor and those his society called “unclean.” He healed physical diseases like epilepsy or fevers; he healed people who were disabled in various ways, the blind, deaf, mute and lame; he healed people suffering from mental illness; and at least once he even raised the dead. He was passionate about his ministry of healing touch, sacred touch; in Mark’s short gospel we read about Jesus feeding people three times, but we read about him healing people 15 times. Jesus embodied the hope we heard in the words of the prophet Isaiah that the deaf would hear, blind see and lame dance. When he called disciples to help him, he commissioned them with the same ministry. “Teach and heal” were his instructions to them, and, indeed, the centerpiece of his three years on earth.

Over two millennia, the church has taken that healing ministry very seriously in a whole variety of ways. Most of the earliest organized hospitals which grew up in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia were established by the church or by missionaries; I was born in one organized by the Evangelical and Reformed Church, Deaconess Hospital in Cleveland. I visited a hospital in Turkey and one in the Gaza Strip founded by Christian missionaries that our gifts to the Wider Mission of the UCC continue to support. Chaplains and counselors and therapists of many kinds bring healing through their work as Christ’s disciples. And every week you and I and Christians like us all over the world pray on behalf of those who are sick in body, mind and spirit. We bring casseroles and prayer shawls and a comforting presence to friend and stranger. In all these ways, we exercise our ministry of sacred, healing touch and we live out our identity as Christ’s body on earth, something we proclaim we become we are each time we gather around this table. In all these ways, we are healers in Christ’s name.

And we should continue to do all these things in Jesus’ name. But there’s one more way we can exercise a ministry of sacred, healing touch. Let’s go back to those two gospel stories a minute and look, not at Jesus, but at this mother pleading for her daughter and at the anonymous group of people identified only as “they” who brought the deaf man to Jesus, for I believe our role as those called to a ministry of Sacred Touch is wrapped up in their actions as well.

In both of these stories, we find people seeking Jesus’ healing touch not for themselves, but for someone they love. A mother agonizes over a daughter’s illness. Friends or family members hope against hope that a dear one might hear laughter and music and words of love. In both cases, people are passionate about seeking healing for someone else. The word used to describe the actions of both the Syro-Phoenician woman and the friends of the deaf man is “begged.” “She begged Jesus to cast the demon out of her daughter.” “They begged Jesus to lay his hands on him.” This is not the only time we see this kind of passion in the gospels. Remember the story of the four friends who were so desperate to have Jesus heal their companion that they took the roof off a house to lower him into it! Or Jairus, the important synagogue leader who begged (the word again appears in Luke’s gospel) Jesus to heal his 12 year old daughter. In each case, it was Jesus’ touch that healed these people, but the touch of Jesus would not have come to them without the love and persistence of those who begged for that touch on behalf of another, sometimes at great personal risk or in the face of the hostility of others, like the woman we heard about in today’s reading. She was not a Jew, and her audacity at asking Jesus for healing met with hostility from those around him who thought she did not deserve it and should go elsewhere, and, at first, she met hostility even from Jesus! But her daughter was healed, and Jesus said it was because of her bodacious persistence.

I have been thinking of this Syro-Phoenician woman as I have tuned in to discussions about health care reform in this country. In the midst of all the shouting and slogans, the hostility of an organized mob, if you listen carefully, you will hear people bodaciously persisting in telling their stories. You’ll hear mothers like this woman in the gospel story begging for help to pay for healing for their children in repeated calls to Insurance companies and hospitals and the government. You’ll hear husbands and wives telling of their quests to get care for their spouses and being denied again and again. You’ll hear of soldiers’ buddies pounding on the doors of the VA to demand quality care for wounded comrades. You’ll hear people advocating on behalf of those whose voices have been silenced by suffering. Are these not also exercising a ministry of healing, just as that woman and the deaf man’s friends partnered with Jesus to bring healing to those they loved? Are they not also living out the call of discipleship to the great Healer?

Sacred touch is not limited to professional healers; it includes those of us who seek to help others find healing. I am growing more and more frustrated by listening to politicians, insurance companies, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, interest groups of all kinds engaging in a debate whose theme the satirical website “The Onion” imagined this week, being summed up as “How can we craft a plan that denies good health care to as many people as possible?” How is it that if we label a plan geared toward helping people get access to care which they now cannot afford as “socialist,” suddenly everyone who promoted it before backtracks, as though now those people don’t matter? As though “socialism” was a disease that could be cured by ignoring the needs of sick and disabled men, women and children? I don’t understand this at all.

I do know this. If we as Christians easily hear the three stories in Mark of Jesus feeding the hungry and so appropriately and happily engage in collecting food and helping at soup kitchens and encouraging the government as well as churches to be involved in helping hungry people get fed (in programs like school lunch and food stamps), then we also must hear the fifteen stories in Mark of Jesus healing and engage personally in helping those who are sick or disabled as well as advocating on their behalf with government or other institutions in society who should also have them in their care.

I do know this. Jesus was an extravagant, profligate haler who colored outside the lines and saw people’s wholeness as more important than social conventions or political labels. I am not Jesus. I was not given the gift of touching people and making them well. But I can be like Jesus and the deaf man’s friends and stand with my friends and family and fellow human beings to help bring them to wholeness. I can also be like Jesus and that bold woman and not give up in the face of hostility and rudeness, in the face of very high odds against me, and advocate that those who need access to the possibility of healing should have a way to get it.

This bread will soon be broken. It reminds us that God knows about broken bodies and despairing spirits. This meal does not call us to dwell in brokenness but to be about the ministry of wholeness, shalom, sacred touch, life, even as God was and is. Eat and drink and be made whole….. and bold. Amen.